Computers are frequently used to store information. If information stored in a file on a computer contains code for a web page, the information in the file can be used to render the page when the file is provided by a server to a browser.
It can be helpful to store information about the file or information related to the file. For example, notes about editing the file, comments and other information may be desirable to store. One way of storing information about a file is to store the information in the file itself. For example, a designer could store notes about the file as an HTML comment by surrounding the comment with the characters, “<!--” before the comment and the character, “-->” after the comment.
If a file contains the source code for a web page, however, storing information about the file or other information as a comment in the file itself may be undesirable for several reasons. One reason has to do with the fact that when a user requests a web page from a server, the source code for the web page is provided by the server to the user's computer system, stored on the user's computer system, and rendered by a browser. Although comments are not rendered by the browser, they are accessible to the user (for example, by clicking on the command “view-source” in the conventional Internet Explorer product commercially available from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.), and the designer of the web page may not wish the user to be able to view the information about the web page stored as a comment. Another reason it may be undesirable to store information about a web page in the source code for the page is that the information will be downloaded as part of the page, increasing the time required to download the page, and driving up costs of serving the web page to users due to increased bandwidth and traffic requirements of the page.
What is needed is a method and system for storing information about a file that does not store the information in the file.